‘Seen, valued and encouraged’ — How Medgar’s Summer Youth Employment Program prioritizes networking that impacts future outcomes
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By David Gil de Rubio | dgilderubio@mec.cuny.edu
For more than 20 years, Dr. Evelyn Castro has watched the Medgar Evers College Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) become a springboard to the world of work for young people.
Through a lottery selection process, roughly 1,400 out of 4,000 New York City applicants between the ages of 16 and 24 are provided with seven weeks of summer employment and educational experiences that build on their individual strengths.
The SYEP mission is something Dr. Castro fervently supports and believes in.
“The importance of this program is that first of all, the kids are engaged and are learning skills they might not have otherwise learned. I have a girl from Moscow University in Russia. I have several kids who are from New York City, came down from Harvard University and always request us. I have a lot of SUNY and CUNY kids,” Dr. Castro said.
“The importance is they meet other people and start to think about what their path is. I have brilliant curriculum developers because to engage them in the summer, you really have to come up with good ideas. You have to be respectful of who they are and their culture, whatever that culture is. And then work with them so they make new relationships and have new experiences.”
It’s a sentiment shared by Dr. Marsha Webster, the head of SYEP, who points out the primary goal of the program is to develop young people, their networks and the teamwork needed to accomplish great goals.
“We want our young people to acquire good habits and at the end of the day, if you finish the program, you become more experienced,” Webster explained.
“We do projects like this having to do with entrepreneurship, problem solving and business development where they get a taste to see what it’s like to go into the working world. And then, at 16, they are able to go out to the work sites. That’s the second part — we have almost 200 work sites that work with our young people. For most of the young people passing through SYEP, this is their first work experience.”
Among the myriad partners SYEP works with are various departments at Medgar Evers College, along with restaurants and other small businesses around the Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan areas. Sectors that are represented include health care, retail and food service.
Along the way, young people are placed in these programs in order to accrue work experience. This is a crucial part of the mission established by the DYCD [Department of Youth and Community Development], which is the sponsoring agency.
For the past three years, SYEP has partnered with JP Morgan Chase, where the participants go as young as kindergarten through college students as old as 24. The younger ones have the idea of finances demystified via activities that include visiting local bank branches, opening a passbook and learning the basics of budgeting, saving and investing.
At the end of the program, they all receive backpacks crammed with school supplies. For program participants who start around the age of 14, the activities become more sophisticated and centered around entrepreneurism and starting a business.
For Shakima Figuera Collins, a fireball of enthusiasm who is former teacher turned JP Morgan Chase community manager, working with SYEP is a crucial part of lifting the community her employer engages with every day.
“For the older kids, five Brooklyn community managers provide the financial education piece in which we cover topics such as budgeting, savings, credit and learning how to protect themselves against fraud and scams,” Figuera Collins explained. “One of the things we have as a main topic is entrepreneurship. They learn in the SYEP program how to start their businesses along with the financial aspect about what it is to raise capital. Why it’s important to budget. What it means to understand cash flow.”
She added, “We were able to teach them all these essential, financial health applications so they can put the two together. What you saw today was the product of adding finance and business. They have a product to sell. They had to manage that product, know how much it costs and you saw the outcome where they applied this financial knowledge. There was an application and then you saw it in actuality. It’s actionable. That’s one of the things we teach them — what a financial goal is, how to build a business and keep in mind the dollar amounts that are needed.”
With teams of young people putting their entrepreneurial into practice, the lobby of AB1 was packed with different tables highlighting companies ranging from Canarsie Plaza (space leasing) and Allere (perfume/cologne designed for those with skin sensitivities and eczema) to Medi-Patch (a device to measure blood sugar and blood pressure) and Royal Curls (hair care).
One of the participants was Ethan Chen, a 15-year-old Stuyvesant High School sophomore whose group of 20 launched its own clothing brand. For Chen, who was a guest speaker and whose older sister was part of the Medgar Evers College Research Institute, SYEP made for a productive summer for him while providing him with tools that would help him succeed going forward with both his academic and professional lives.
“For me, SYEP was mostly networking and getting to know others,” Chen said. “Basically, just moving and being productive throughout my summer. Last year, we had a networking event that I really enjoyed. I was hoping for something more like that this year and what happened today exceeded my expectations. I think my greatest takeaways were the growth of my public speaking skills along with all the networking connections I’ve gotten and people I’ve spoken with.”
One of the ways the SYEP/JP Morgan Chase partnership kept the interest level high on the last day of this year’s program was by bringing in Gerard Williams, the Hip Hop Gamer, another partner whose enthusiasm and sage advice helped keep the energy level at a high.
Williams, a gamer since the age of four thanks to his grandmother, currently holds down a spot hosting the Hip Hop Gamer Show on Hot 97 in addition to working directly with a number of tech companies. With gaming and hip hop proving a connection point with the SYEP attendees. Williams was enthusiastic in providing pearls of wisdom centering on personal responsibility, networking, positivity and community. In addition, his offer to help motivated individuals included his repeatedly offering his personal email to establish a connection.
“I’m a professional at eliminating excuses — I don’t complain, I create,” he said to the audience. “It’s very easy to let the negative noise, especially on social media, block you from the blessings God already has for you. I’m telling you all right now, anytime you see something that’s a problem, don’t be quick to just be involved with the problem and say you want to fight this or fight that. Nah. Find a solution because if you complain and you don’t have a solution then guess what? You’re part of that problem too. So, figure it out.”
He added, “There’s too much love in this room, too much help in this room and too much education in this room for you not to make it. Take advantage of everything you can. I’m here to help. Any questions you’ve got, ask me. I’m in the industry, but I’m not of the industry. Holla at me. I do this for real. Another thing I want to tell y’all is you don’t know what tomorrow will bring and you don’t know what tomorrow will take away, so be the gift in your moment.”
Taking it all in was Deborah Johnson, a marketing manager with JP Morgan Chase’s Corporate and Community Responsibility Team. To say Johnson was feeling elevated in taking in the end results on full display on this final day of the program was an understatement.
“This is all very multi-layered and you can feel the love,” Johnson said. “The little ones, the big kids. I’m in heaven right here. I’ve been in this space for a very long time. I know pouring into young people is so incredibly important and for them to be seen, valued and encouraged — they get it all here. One thing that’s very difficult to teach once they get older is how to work with other people. For them to have learned that and then tap it off with learning about finances. I like how they connected with the young man [the Hip Hop Gamer] who gave his story about it’s not about the concept he had, but about understanding budgeting, how to build great credit and what happens when you don’t do that. And then transferring that over to the fact that he’s an entrepreneur and you need to understand budgeting, because you have to have a business plan.”
With JP Morgan Chase proving to be such an invested partner, Dr. Webster has been thrilled to see how effective these exercises and projects have been in helping elevate the program’s participants.
“[JP Morgan Chase has] done amazing work in terms of the financial literacy and financial health workshops they’ve been doing,” Webster said. “I get feedback from the young people that they didn’t know about things like credit scores and budgeting. It’s like a lightbulb goes off. The truth is that a lot of them did not know about these kinds of financial matters and this has become a partnership that is teaching them these skills that they’re going to carry with them into their future.”